07 workshop photo

My family history is pretty complex due to how it took me almost 16 years to understand. I’m a first-gen Singaporean so my parents were migrants, my dad being from the Philippines and my mom from Malaysia. My parents were both mixed so I ultimately became a Rojak child and couldn’t confine to just being solely Chinese, as stated on my IC. Coming from a Filipino dad, I still retain a Chinese surname due to…. A few generations ago's grandfather in China jumped on a random boat that brought him to the Philippines because he was escaping an arranged marriage.

I know that during a time I was either not born yet or too young to remember that my father enjoyed taking photos of the family. For some reason, I've not actually seen most of these pictures, or really heard much about them. It would be interesting to dig these up.

Personal memories of mine are usually captured by others. Posted on Instagram, sent to me as photos, recorded in videos, captured in childhood photographs, written as a note are among the many ways in which others have captured our time together. I'm usually unconcerned with capturing the moment, as my primary desire is to remember and embrace the moment fully. Recording and preserving are not intuitive instincts for me, and I've always felt that to be, at times, an insufficiency to fully grasp an experience. Despite that, I still don't record or preserve, but I remember.

I have been very lucky with the immediate family I have been allocated to in life. I see how past experiences and societal norms have molded my parents, and by extension, how their being affect the way I am today. My paternal grandparents were Hindu Ceylonese Tamil migrants to Malaya and my maternal grandmother is a Chinese woman who was adopted by an Indian Tamil Catholic family. My maternal grandfather passed away when my mum was a young adult, so I know and feel the least about him. I'm keen on exploring through photographs how the actions and/or in-actions of my grandparents inform who I am today.

Digital photograph is the most convenient way - with smartphones, vsco, instagram, they are the quickest way to capture a happy moment. However, sometimes when dealing with memories embedded with more more complex emotions, writing in a journal/finsta helps to capture the more intangible aspect of memories - feelings and thoughts.

Personally, I’m curious about the way of discipline my grandparents used to bring my parents up. My grandparents are very loving and lenient to me, my sister and my cousins but seem to be very harsh on my parents. Just curious what happened in between?

My visual memory isn't great - I instead tend to associate the past with certain emotions and certain states of mind. Believe me when I say that almost anything sensory can be enough to trigger those emotions or states - a scent, a picture, a few words, a voice. I write about my days, I take pictures, and sometimes I preserve actual physical objects, but they are all rooted in some experiential association that I have to them. I use them as pathways to my past.

I'd like to explore how my position in the family, as the youngest child, as the only male son in a Chinese family, has affected the way I view myself growing up. How does these family dynamics affect my development? It's true that I've had certain expectations placed on me based on my status within the family. But I'd also like to believe that I've had a pretty 'liberal' upbringing as far as personal and professional expectations go. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle...

My memories are stored in terabytes of data: I have hard drive disks that date back to 2006. Not only do they store old computer files, but also audio-visual recordings, still images, family photos and writings from my blog. These storage systems are like digital time capsules and are integral to protecting my precious memories.

I hail from a large, extended family that dates its ancestry to China's Guangdong province. My great grandfather arrived in Singapore in the 1930s and brought up a dozen or so children, fathered between two wives. They settled in the North-East region of Singapore and my older relatives still proudly proclaim themselves 'Punggol nang', which in Singlish-Teochew means 'Punggol residents', despite long ago having moved to other parts of the island. To them, the neighbourhood was more than a place - it was a community that shaped their beliefs, principles and way of life.

I record these memories in a journal, and try to give vivid descriptions of these events. Sometimes, I would print photos to paste into my journal, so that I can recall what these memories are in future. Sometimes when I am busy, I would log these events down in point form in my journal.

I am interested to participate in this event because I am interested in cyanotype and I want to learn more about it. I am intrigued by the potential this medium presents in helping me to alter imagery to fit the narrative I want to craft, on my own terms. As an educator also, I hope to take the lessons I learn in this workshop into my classes as I am interested to teach my students the importance of preserving what is important, and I believe using cyanotype would be a good way to introduce these ideas to my students.

i want to experience physically memorializing moments – specifically with photos that i rarely (dare to) look at. this is also making me realise i have no family photos with everyone in it

i feel a lot of grief (not just for the physically deceased but also the emotionally repressed stuff). i would like to explore this grief and also healing and how to introduce honesty (or any new thing) into a dynamic that has been around for all my life

I have a journal that I carry with me at all times. Sometimes, a thought comes to me at night and I scribble it onto loose sheets of paper. Over the years, this has led me to have a series of writings — some more coherent than others — stacked haphazardly in the corner of my bookshelf.

Until very recently, I’ve been quite independent from my family, often wandering out and depending more on friends instead. As I progress through my 20’s, that independence has evolved into greater intrigue about my own past — especially about my Teochew and peranakan (?) roots.